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Behind a Calm Facade, Chaos, Distrust, Valor

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From the outset, the daily news conferences giving updates on the recovery and investigation of the crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800 were unfailingly confident and practiced. There was a sense of control in the measured answers, the technical knowledge of the safety experts, even in the top F.B.I. man's tough talk about ''collaring the cowards who did this.'' Always, caution was urged.

But the televised appearances were deceiving, for the convincing performances in restraint masked a much more complex and frantic scramble to action going on behind the scenes, at least in the first stages of the investigation. There, lines of authority were unclear, levels of experience varied, and people fought through sleeplessness for coherence and progress.

A reconstruction of the investigation shows that at least in its early weeks, it was what one investigator called ''a shotgun marriage'' -- the imperfectly matched cultures of transportation safety experts, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies. The coming together produced its share of fractures. Indeed, the varying agendas and differing personal styles produced suspicions about everything from news leaks to professional competence.

The most senior officials with the National Transportation Safety Board wound up furious with their own personnel at the scene, convinced that the agency had ceded control of the inquiry to the F.B.I.; the prospect that ''friendly fire'' might have destroyed the Boeing 747 lingered ominously for investigators for days as the Department of Defense slowly eliminated all conceivable possibilities; distrust was so deep at times that workers with the Medical Examiner's office and agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms thought their telephone calls were being monitored by the F.B.I.

But the reconstruction of the investigation into the July 17 crash shows that in the rush for the kind of answers turned up in an F.B.I. laboratory in Washington, people pushed themselves to their limits. Divers operating far beyond their experience partnered dozens of victims up through the sea's basement of black. Pathologists, operating in a kind of hypnotic trance, had to be physically pried from the autopsy tables and sent for sleep.

There have been secret, sober subplots, as well. The inquiry forced investigators to confront daily decisions about how much information to make public. Concerned about causing widespread alarm, they muted their statements on how seriously they were taking the notion that a missile had brought down the aircraft.

Faced with the problem of preserving evidence and extricating victims from tangles of wreckage, investigators finally ordered that no one speak of any bodies found underwater, but only those officially counted and brought to shore. The aim was to keep the expectations of family members realistic.

The investigation has been played out in part on television, in part on a distant expanse of the ocean, and in part behind armed guards at an old airplane hangar where agents and experts, each hoarding his own information, rebuild the aircraft and try to reconstruct the catastrophe.

But it was in the environment of the forensics laboratory in Washington that the investigation's greatest breakthrough occurred. The discovery, kept under wraps for roughly two weeks, could in time alter the nature of the investigation. The F.B.I. could soon declare the crash a crime and expand its investigation to pursue suspects.

''A lot died with screams across their faces,'' a senior investigator said of the 230 victims. ''You want to try and answer those screams.''

An Initial Chaos

Struggle for Order During First Days

In trying to find these answers, the first response of investigators and rescuers was less than smooth. The outfit of agents with guns and badges, aviators and engineers, giant ships and underwater robots, began its work in fits and starts in what was a scene of raw ruination, a hailstorm of humans and aluminum that showered the sea nine miles off shore.

Looking back, those involved in the recovery talk of a frenzy not quite captured in the accounts of the catastrophe's early moments. In a stifling heat, investigators worked in protective ''biosuits'' the first several days, unsure of what they were dealing with in the recovery, and afraid of its hazards. At one point, after reports of H.I.V.-infected blood on the flight circulated, a brief panic erupted on the Coast Guard station dock. A glass container broke and something that might or might not have been blood splashed everywhere. A madcap cleanup with bleach and brushes followed.

Coast Guard ships, thinking they were protecting the quadrant of sea that was, in truth, an enormous, shifting accident scene, briefly kept out boats officially assigned to help in the recovery. An impostor in the uniform of an Army officer showed up at the command center and helped direct helicopter traffic around the guarded zone the first night and into the next day. He was eventually found out, escorted from the scene but was not arrested. The authorities said he had done a fine job.

Navy searchers unsuccessfully tried locating the so-called black boxes with electronic equipment, and one boat had a sonar device snag in the wreckage. A camera malfunctioned. The F.B.I. was trying to integrate efforts and placing agents with radios on every boat they could find. Victims were inadvertently being double-counted on the docks where they were unloaded.

''Everybody was running doing their own thing,'' said a Federal investigator, who, like others interviewed, spoke only on the condition of anonymity. ''There was no collective communication. The Police Department had their own thing, going into the Mayor with reports. The Fire Department did not talk with the Police Department. No one was wrong or bad, but no one was together.''

The F.B.I. and the safety board griped about the delay of days before the Navy's big salvage ships arrived on the scene. Dismayed by what he perceived as a lack of leadership and action, a senior F.B.I. agent said he read a ranking Navy officer on the scene a polite version of the ''riot act'' in the first week. The Navy officer, in turn, gave the F.B.I. agent a loud, lengthy lecture on the dangers and strategies of deep-sea salvage operations. The agent left humbled.

The simple truth behind the struggle for order was that no one had ever done anything quite like it before.

The lead investigator for the safety board, Alfred Dickinson, had run only one other major investigation -- a 1991 crash in Colorado that remains unsolved. The Navy divers, who had the most experience recovering victims, had never faced this magnitude of death, and its profound toll was captured in the tersely neutral phrase offered by a senior Navy official. His divers, he said, had suffered a significant ''psychological penalty.'' A device -- an underwater laser camera imported from San Diego -- was put into action as a long-shot experiment.

Of course, the size of the task confronting the assembled archaeologists of disaster was difficult to comprehend, much less decipher.

The 747, the sturdy beast of the airline industry, was an enormous structure, a modern-day, airborne ocean liner weighing more than a half million pounds at takeoff. The plane was so big -- it is the largest civilian aircraft in the world -- that the entire first flight of the Wright Brothers could have taken place inside it.

The enthusiastic but erratic efforts at preservation, retrieval and examination -- parts of the aircraft spread from Southampton to Coney Island -- was sufficiently problematic that for the first time ever, a director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, James Lee Witt, was sent to an airplane disaster scene to, as he put it, ''see how it's going.'' Mr. Witt decided to have a detailed daily report on what every agency was doing sent to the White House.

An effort was made to be delicate about the significance of his arrival. Others were less politic.

''Everyone wanted to help,'' a senior investigator said. ''Everybody wanted to be out on the water. Everybody wanted to do everything, and that was great. But there was literally no collective spokesperson or collective integrator. We wasted a fair amount of time doing damage control on misinformation.''

Inside the Inquiry

F.B.I. and N.T.S.B.: Odd Bedfellows

''I get anything I want,'' James K. Kallstrom, the F.B.I. assistant director in charge of the New York office said of his access to resources during the investigation of Flight 800. ''I can use anything. I can do anything I want to do. I don't have any limitations.''

No one argued the point with Mr. Kallstrom. If anything, people came to be bent under the weight of the statement's truth. Considered as an electronic surveillance expert, a street-smart G-man, Mr. Kallstrom profited from an even more critical distinction in the world of law enforcement: He is a highly regarded F.O.L. -- Friend of Louis J. Freeh, the director of the F.B.I.

The Friends of Louie is an elite group of agents who have known the director for years and whose careers have soared under Mr. Freeh's stewardship. And so, agents in Washington who watched Mr. Kallstrom talk at news conferences about the T.W.A. crash with a candor unusual in Mr. Freeh's bureau, were slightly surprised, but not shocked.

''Once you have been knighted by the king,'' one agent said, ''you get away with a lot.''

Mr. Kallstrom's prominence and authority translated into instant stature for those who worked under him. In the first week of the investigation, a senior agent on the scene said he felt he was being ignored by Navy officials until Mr. Kallstrom showed up on the scene and made it clear that the agent was his chosen point man.

The sense of the F.B.I.'s omnipotence, reflected most personally in Mr. Kallstrom's clout, came to deeply color the dynamic of what the Federal agents repeatedly emphasized was a ''parallel'' and not a ''joint '' investigation.

The F.B.I., with its investigators who talked the rough, often imprecise language of cops, had from the first moments an institutional conviction that terrorists had downed the plane. The agency thus acutely felt the need to gather evidence quickly and get on with a focused pursuit of suspects.

The safety board, on the other hand, was an agency set up with the explicit intent that it be independent from hunches, quick answers, instant blame. Its goal is to closely examine every system involved in aviation to see if there is a way of making flying safer. Its people are pilots and technicians and their words are calibrated as finely as their computerized search grids.

When the safety board approaches a case, it knows the story is complete, but undiscovered. Its aims are answers, not arrests. It does not worry about a trail going cold.

And so despite the smiling, deferential diplomacy of the news briefings, the contrast in the two agencies' styles and purpose generated suspicion along with respect, disbelief along with the shared successes.

Perhaps as a result of its organizational disposition, the safety board wound up the lead agency more in theory than reality, overwhelmed by the manpower and what some officials considered the willingness to publicly voice theories of the Federal law enforcement officials.

It was a reality that appeared almost inevitable from the outset. Things, after all, did not go well for the safety board early on, and the problems, from the logistical to the symbolic, cost the safety investigators the appearance of unquestioned leadership.

Senior N.T.S.B. officials say they could not get to the crash scene quickly. They were forced to wait in Washington as a Coast Guard plane, carrying military officials but with available seats, roared off to Long Island from National Airport without them the morning after the plane crashed. Once on Long Island, the F.B.I. was everywhere, with agents, cellular phones and computer-equipped trailers. They were already conducting interviews with witnesses, a decision by the F.B.I. to proceed alone that some safety board officials silently fumed over.

To board officials, the sight of the F.B.I. in an all-out offensive was both impressive and intimidating. The N.T.S.B. people borrowed phones, shared space. Their jaws fell open when the F.B.I., within hours, ordered up a high-tech trailer for the board to have as its own command center. The N.T.S.B. had roughly 26 investigators on scene; the F.B.I. had, at least for weeks, as many as 500 agents working the investigation.

''The F.B.I. has so much money, so many people, they must have cryogenic chambers where they keep all the agents until they warm them up when they need them,'' said one admiring safety board official, Robert Benzon, who alternated with Mr. Dickinson as the lead investigator.

So acutely felt was the perception that the F.B.I. was in charge that the safety board, struggling to impose its own version of order, sent out an urgent request to its offices in Washington: send more N.T.S.B. T-shirts. Feeling lost in the crowds of F.B.I. agents, the safety board wanted its people to be able to recognize one another.

For the safety board, the problems went beyond a brief inferiority complex. Speculation about conclusions and evidence, frequently supplied to reporters by law enforcement officials, required the board to refute or play it down. The F.B.I. rushed to interview witnesses before the safety board knew the witnesses existed, according to aviation investigators; then it reduced the value of the interviews by failing to ask the right questions, a veteran investigator said. That investigator, accompanied by F.B.I. agents, re-interviewed some witnesses but said he had trouble getting a complete picture of who had been interviewed.

''They are kind of overbearing,'' a safety board investigator said of the F.B.I. ''They immediately took control, and hampered a lot of things we did.''

One senior F.B.I. investigator, who said he came to respect the talents and tirelessness of the safety board officials, nonetheless did not hide his belief that a tone was set early and emphatically.

The F.B.I. official said of the safety investigators, ''They are not managers, not leaders, and they have no genes for managing significant resources to tackle a problem.''

So persuasive was the F.B.I.'s display of manpower and conviction that they would find evidence of a bomb that even high-level safety board officials thought they would be needed only for a couple of days. ''Maybe we would keep a skeleton crew up here with the F.B.I.,'' one safety investigator remembered thinking.

Any air of inevitability was punctured soon, and the safety board was back to recalling its rule of thumb for airplane crashes: if there is no answer in 48 hours, one is in for the long haul. Two days into the crash investigation of Flight 800, people did not even know exactly where the plane was.

As the agents and investigators forged ahead through the gathering wreckage and the public briefings, they realized repeatedly what an odd fit they constituted. Daily, they moved about the hangars where the plane was being reconstructed like guests at a hotel attending two different conventions.

The F.B.I., worried about a prosecution of a criminal case, demanded that each piece of wreckage be handled in accordance with the ''chain of custody,'' a process aimed at insuring that prosecutors can trace the chronology of a piece of evidence's handling. Forensics specialists from the F.B.I. and A.T.F. often kept to themselves, and signs were posted warning safety experts to stay out.

''The N.T.S.B. people were fine, certainly knowledgeable, but they had blinkers on, man,'' said a Federal agent who worked out at the hangar. ''No opinions. No nothing. Their black boxes seemed to rule out mechanical malfunction. Their systems people said all safety directives had been complied with for this aircraft. The engines were fine. Their theory about a fuel explosion evaporated.

''But nothing. Never an opinion.''

Two incidents, both of which had a brief public life, but enduring reverberations among the groups of investigators, came to crystallize the contrasts in methodology.

The first involved the aircraft's front landing gear. Damage to that part of the airplane was severe. To a number of F.B.I. and A.T.F. experts, the damage was consistent with bomb damage, and thus extremely telling, if not conclusive. Those opinions made their way into news accounts.

Officials with the safety board, even those who privately conceded that a bomb was the most likely explanation of the disaster, were dumbstruck by the way law enforcement officials had interpreted the information and by the fact that it had made its way to the public as a particularly important find. Some N.T.S.B. investigators found the discovery interesting but hardly conclusive; others regarded it as so inconclusive as to make speculation nonsense.

Clearly, it was not something that the safety board, in its nightly progress meetings to update information, had wanted disseminated. Decisions on what to and how much to say were made in consultation with the various groups of experts that make up an N.T.S.B. investigative team -- the structures people, engine people, systems people, human performance people.

Two weeks into the investigation, the N.T.S.B. was all but sure it had lost any vague appearance of clear-cut control. In one of the daily media briefings, Mr. Kallstrom appeared to say he was confident of finding the cause of the crash within 48 hours. The N.T.S.B. avoids predictions like the plague. That sets up false expectations; that sets up everyone to be embarrassed.

Mr. Kallstrom's subsequent clarification -- he said he was merely predicting that a Navy ship would be in a position to retrieve important wreckage within 48 hours -- did not mitigate the safety board's uneasiness.

To the most senior of N.T.S.B. officials, the F.B.I., from the staff level up, was operating as it never had before in a joint investigation. The safety board's top officials effectively accused its own investigators of having ceded authority, and they portrayed the F.B.I. as aggressive beyond propriety.

Mr. Kallstrom discounted the portrait of an overly assertive F.B.I. He said that the ground rules had been worked out early on, and that he and Robert T. Francis, the vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, had been vigilantly solicitous of each other's concerns.

Mr. Francis played down talk of a real rift or authentic loss of authority by the safety board. In fact, he said he and Mr. Kallstrom had grown fond of each other and even socialized.

Mr. Francis and others, while acknowledging that friction among agencies and investigators had existed throughout, said they did not believe the results of the investigation had been materially harmed.

He said the board's relationship with the F.B.I. in this case was unusual, only because the disaster may involve sabotage.

''This is not a typical investigation,'' he said. ''The people that don't deal with that as well as others then start to complain.'' He added, ''Maybe I'm not a very good bureaucrat, but it seems to me we are talking about the Federal Government here.''

The Morgue

As Bodies Pile Up, A Hypnotic State

As the investigation unwound, the principals at its heart tried to hold up in the face of forces and scrutiny that worked on them from all angles. Why was it taking so long? Why would not they say what they truly felt? Why did it take so long for the Navy ships to be in position?

No force, however, worked harder on everyone than the power of the families of the victims -- a vigilant, emotional and political presence. Their moral stature could not be questioned, at least not publicly. They had access to information, both good and erroneous, and unending access to microphones and television cameras.

And so, the victims -- how fast they were recovered, how quickly they were identified, whether they had become secondary to the recovery of possibly criminal evidence -- shaped almost every aspect of the investigation for weeks.

At the center of the vortex of circumstance and intrigue was the morgue at the Suffolk County Medical Examiner's Office. There, Dr. Charles V. Wetli came under an avalanche of criticism. Politicians had accused him of being too interested in publicity. Relatives of victims wanted him to work faster. The top F.B.I. investigator ordered him to triple his rate of identifications.

By way of response, Dr. Wetli and the other pathologists said next to nothing. Instead, they worked nonstop, turning the two-story morgue with the dark-tinted windows into an insulated, private world of science and improvisation.

''This is a political barroom that the politicians deal with, and we have to ignore this,'' Dr. Wetli said he told his colleagues of the storms outside their doors. ''Don't worry about it, forget about watching TV, reading the newspapers. We've got a job to do. What you have to do is look at your microcosm of existence in this autopsy world, and you concentrate on what you are doing.''

In interviews, pathologists described how the hard and agonizing work got done, replete with feats of intelligence, intuition and endurance. So intense was the concentration that police officers occasionally had to intervene and escort pathologists to bed.

There were five tables for autopsies at the Suffolk County Medical Examiner's office. From the day after the crash, the tables were full, each always surrounded by three more victims to come. A row of fans standing six-feet high ran nonstop to clear the odor of disinfectant. Masseuses and chiropractors provided support for the incessantly busy pathologists. The refrigerated trucks out back -- lent by Ryder and Hub outlets -- held the next bodies. A line of gray hearses idled, waiting for more work no one wanted.

Trying to describe the numbing burden, Dr. Wetli said, ''If you can imagine the busiest day you ever had in your life, double that and make it twice as long for 10 consecutive days.'' Trying again, he said it was ''kind of like trying to do brain surgery on a roller coaster.''

Initials etched into wedding rings helped identify some people, as did tattoos and toe nail polish. Doctors came from France to help bridge cultural divides and language problems as the doctors dealt with relatives.

At times, 300 people -- doctors, dentists, clergy and investigators -- roamed the morgue and its offices. Three days after the crash, five pathologists, including three who drove in the same car from Syracuse, arrived to help.

In at least one instance, fingerprints were required to match one recovered hand to another. Detectives were sent across the country and abroad to dust for fingerprints in the homes of victims. One of the first victims identified was a young girl. Her father sent the footprints that had been taken at her birth. They matched.

A radiologist brought on board became a miracle worker of sorts, so gifted was he at interpreting X-rays of the mutilated. One X-ray showed a certain type of rib formation; the radiologist concluded that it had to be a black victim, and the range of possibilities was instantly reduced. A dentist, working with strips of skin and a mashed skull, nonetheless was able to repeatedly declare, ''I have seen that face,'' and connect it to one of the photographs of victims posted in the office.

The circumstances required that cultural differences be dealt with to satisfy everyone as best as possible. There were numerous Orthodox Jewish victims, and many of their relatives objected to autopsies. They were avoided when possible. But in at least one case, Dr. Wetli thought the forensic information to be gained from one victim might be too great not to perform an autopsy.

A rabbi conveyed the decision to the family; a separate room was used, and into it filed two rabbis and an F.B.I. agent.

''Just because you have a mass disaster doesn't mean that people are suspending their religious beliefs,'' Dr. Wetli said.

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The accommodations had rarely been devised before. The F.B.I., for instance, had two agents standing at the autopsy tables. They held two plastic cups for shrapnel or other objects removed from the victims.

In investigating blasts, pathologists look for certain burns of the skin, mouth and airways, damage to the lungs. The doctors said numerous victims had been found to have shrapnel and shards of the plane in their bodies, but none appeared to have resulted from a bomb.

The Medical Examiner's most helpful information was that people seated in the front of the plane had appeared to suffer much more serious injury. A bomb in the front cargo or lower cabin might have explained the injuries.

But Dr. Wetli and others eventually backed off even the shadings of meaning their examinations had produced. An explosion had happened and killed people was as much as he could say.

''So right now, all we have are a bunch of pieces of a huge puzzle,'' he said.

Throughout the medical search that manufactured such meager investigative rewards, everyone in the investigation, and those from as far outside it as President Clinton, did a sometimes indelicate waltz around the questions of the victims.

A week into the investigation, relatives complained that the search for victims had been subsumed by the efforts to recover the plane's black boxes. ''I want my brother,'' Michel Olivier, a relative of a victim, said. Max Dadi, the brother of another victim, said, ''The black box does not matter for us.''

Even the disclosure of how many victims had been discovered and thus might be recovered became almost toxic. On July 22, Mr. Kallstrom said divers had found at least 40 victims in and around a major wreckage site. The next day, Gov. George E. Pataki, saying he was relying on direct information from investigators, estimated that 60 to 100 victims had been seen.

The families were relieved, and then turned furious when Mr. Francis of the N.T.S.B. refuted the declarations of Mr. Kallstrom and Mr. Pataki. The dispute -- others maintain it was intentional deception -- evolved out of an nearly unsolvable dilemma:

Does confirming the number of victims raise false hopes among relatives who might not get their loved ones back because sharks and crabs and bluefish were eating them on the ocean floor? Will announcing the numbers create a desire for their return so great that important aspects of the recovery of evidence will be compromised?

The questions hung over the operation constantly. In the end, people inside the investigation say, a decision was made: There would only be talk about bodies recovered, nothing more about what divers had seen. The order was given to the divers themselves.

Without announcement, Dr. Wetli and the other pathologists tried to repair the early wounds. Around 6 P.M. every evening, members of Dr. Wetli's office traveled to the Ramada Hotel where the relatives were staying at Kennedy Airport, a sizeable trip that Mr. Wetli said severely hampered his efforts.

''It was just amazing to look at a whole ballroom full of people with just looks of helplessness on their faces and exhaustion,'' said Dr. Janice E. Ross, a forensic pathologist from Auburn, N.Y.

''Many had a desire to speak with the pathologists, not necessarily to know any details about what had been seen,'' Dr. Mary Jumbelic said. ''But just so they could talk to a doctor who had dealt with their loved one.''

Bereft of definitive answers, Dr. Wetli at least was able to offer an approximate assurance: no one likely had remained conscious for any part of their fall to earth.

''Whatever happened up there happened and that consciousness was lost by virtually everybody very, very quickly,'' he said.

The Scene at Sea

Sights of Horror And Bravery

On the seas, where cameras and reporters were not allowed, the strains were different. There, a macabre mining of the sea's ruins unfolded. The effort involved technological miracles, individual guts, a bit of luck and much imprecision of execution.

And almost always, the results did not deliver the thrilling, easy conclusion to what had required such a dark harvest of misery.

Because the scenes were highly sensitive, often profoundly upsetting, the public was not shown what went on at sea. But privately, investigators and technicians and Navy officials spoke of valor and miscues and haunting successes.

Initially, there were six floating command posts spread out across the search area. With each believing it was charged with keeping the expanding grids of exploration inviolate, the command posts mistakenly kept out boats assigned to help in the search .

Later, according to technical experts working on the sonar ships, Navy officials, steadfast in their decision to recover victims first, did not act on advice and information and move the salvage operation closer to Kennedy Airport, where the technicians thought they had uncovered a third debris field. The discovery wound up to be the most intensely worked wreckage site, the one investigators believed might hold a key.

But the work of the divers was the most important and harrowing. Sonar bounces well off metal, but not so well off human beings. Capable of staying on the floor for 90 minutes, the Navy divers roamed a soundless world of destruction and death.

Victims were entangled in the miles of cables and wires or buried beneath the windowed hunks of the plane. Divers, armed with evidence tags, slid identifying labels on chunks of evidence and floated them to the surface. As the days elapsed, the grim reality of what was happening to the victims was witnessed but not spoken of publicly: Crabs and fish were picking at the victims.

With limited visibility, the victims could appear before the divers suddenly, their faces locked in some final expression. And then for the divers, there would be the slow ascent with the partners who often appeared strangely unhurt.

''You pull up someone who looks like your wife or child, and you never forget that,'' said Frank Farrell, a counselor working with Suffolk County police divers. ''Trauma burns into your memory.''

Divers had to be debriefed after every trip to the ocean floor. Anxiety, anger, guilt, insomnia, nightmares. All were reported. At least seven divers had to spend four hours in the decompression chamber on the ships.

Perhaps the best spontaneous purchase was by the Navy of an experimental laser camera flown from San Diego. Never used in a similar search operation, the laser camera relayed television quality pictures of the debris. Its first sweep of the site discovered and charted a critical discovery: the front part of what was a decapitated aircraft.

The successes often were not easy to experience -- many of them described as ''biological targets,'' namely human beings. At 3 A.M. on July 27, the laser operators were dispatched to a latitude and longitude simply called ''Target 29.'' Thought to be two airline seats, the laser determined that there were three seats, and that they were not empty.

A week later, the laser camera identified the first items to have spiraled from the aircraft -- shattered aircraft parts and luggage complete with First Class tags. The find solidified the suspicions of a bomb.

''That's a great system,'' an F.B.I. agent said over a radio one night. ''Why don't we have one?''

Inside the Hangar

A Slow Pace, Testing for Bombs

The pursuit of answers and evidence, if less dramatic, was no less relentless off the sea, in the isolation of a converted hangar. There, in a place that used to crackle as Grumman Corporation workers built fighter planes, the pace was deliberate, the rhythms of reconstruction more orderly. There were charts, computers, cold hunks of airplane.

But if there was no risk of death, there was tension and frustration among the bomb experts and airplane engineers, say those inside the hangar, the country's most closely watched makeshift laboratory. There was even despair on the first, worst days when the highly expensive and sophisticated Egis bomb detection machines sat idle because the available wreckage was so unlikely a source of bomb residue.

But the mood shifted greatly inside the old fighter-plane hangar in Calverton, L.I., early July 22. The machine that detects preliminary traces of bomb residue had its first positive hit -- for PETN, a component of plastic explosives. After days of what one investigator called ''grunt work'' -- cataloguing parts, separating debris, sweating in the air thick with the stench of fuel fumes and human remains, the place had a pulse.

Word spread by whispers and winks. The secrecy, even among the Federal agents, had people waiting to find ''secure lines'' before telephoning colleagues. The investigators invented loaded phrases of circumspection. Informed of the finding, one investigator back at the Coast Guard station told another, ''It's different out there at the hangar.'' The implication was clear.

A day later, laboratory results from Washington came back inconclusive. The ritual played out at least 10 times, according to investigators -- positive preliminary results ultimately unsustained by lab analysis -- until the breakthrough two weeks ago.

''The environment was very charged,'' one investigator said. ''But there's no point to having an answer unless it's the right one. You could wind up in a courtroom, your right hand in the air. You make a call on these things, you live with it.''

Still, there was hope through all the disappointments at Calverton. Some of the experts minimized the threat of the salt water, sure that the critical evidence of a blast would be found. ''It's like fossils,'' an agent said.

As the wreckage came in, others were troubled by the failure to detect appreciable residue. The complicated task of mounting a circumstantial case to declare a crime was increasingly confronted.

Meanwhile, the detection machine -- the Egis machine is known by the bomb experts as a ''kind of super sniffer'' -- turned out more positive hits. The results became almost a bane, and the F.B.I. moaned about the usefulness of the machine.

The Egis machine sniffs vapors of invisible particles. It can detect C4, a plastic explosive made by the United States military, Semtex, an explosive manufactured in Eastern Europe, and Detasheet, a plastic compound that comes in quarter-inch thick sheets and that contains PETN. A 10-pound vacuum sniffs a sample of air, which is then transferred to a 4-feet-by-2-feet metal box. The machine's computer spits out a chemical profile.

Certain Federal agents, calling the F.B.I.'s laboratory in Washington a ''black hole,'' remained convinced that the bureau was hiding its positive lab confirmations.

''There was one problem after another with this investigation, from weather to lab results,'' a Federal investigator said. ''People became incredibly frustrated. Then, with information sacred and everybody wishing for the smoking gun, people got paranoid. It was like separate cells were formed. Certain people would only speak with certain other people.''

While secrets were preserved, there were relaxations of the wariness. For instance, two Federal agents, after staring at a fragment of aircraft, asked a safety board expert nearby for help. He, in turn, had to consult with a Boeing engineer. In a moment, the manufacturer's representative identified the part.

But some investigators began to suspect that with millions of dollars at stake, industry representatives were reading into the wreckage what they wanted to see.

One industry expert was sure he had seen ''shock waves'' in the fuselage, a clear indication of a bomb. Law enforcement authorities said it was unclear what the damage was, and what meaning it held. And according to a Federal official, the people representing the engine's manufacturer, Pratt & Whitney, did not hide their relief when the four engines had been brought to shore, opened and declared a non-factor.

The competing conclusions only fueled the news coverage of the investigation, and thus the public's sense of what was true, what was coming.

''The most frustrating thing is all the people that are talking to the news media, giving different versions and having different agendas,'' Mr. Kallstrom said. Later, he added, ''I have a problem with anyone rooting for anything. And if they are rooting for anything that's unique to their sphere of influence or their domain, they're part of the problem, not part of the solution.''

There was no solution to the disabling sadness. Investigators, wearing surgical masks against the odors, created cardboard boxes for each victim. Into each went every piece of personal belonging that could be linked to an individual -- wedding rings, wallets, a coloring book.

Then there were the personal belongings and the clothing that did not have obvious owners -- ''orphaned'' bits, the agents called them.

''You just have to find a way to keep sorting through it all,'' said an investigator who had worked on a handful of airline bombing investigations. ''Pick through the debris, run your eyes and hands over what appears interesting, test it, test it again. You wait for that jewel. Of course, it's a sick jewel, in a way.''

The Process

An Epic Exercise In Elimination

Despite the initial chaos and the ensuing divisions of opinion and operational style, a unifying thread came to course through the investigation. The thread was frustration.

The investigation, after all, had become one large, detailed map of dead ends. Results from the forensics lab were inconclusive. Theories of structural malfunction, from probability's outer fringes, were undone by hard data. The ocean stubbornly refused to give up solid leads.

The entire investigation, then, became an epic exercise in elimination. Knocking down theories -- in their entirety or in their speculative detail -- became the most satisfying work.

The momentum for erasing a mechanical failure as the cause of the crash gathered early and never really relented.

The aircraft had recently been through some of the most rigorous examinations the industry requires. The black boxes revealed only sudden silence after a split-second sound spoke volumes to investigators, downgrading malfunction's standing as a theory.

Within days of their discovery, a second major site of debris, the front of the plane, was located. The inference was inescapable: The plane had split -- just as Pan Am 103 had over Lockerbie, Scotland. A third debris field sprinkled with luggage and tiny scraps of metal underscored the suspicion for everyone that the malfunction theory was fantasy. The engines proved fine four weeks into the inquiry; the fuel tank, the last, best hope for theorists of mechanical failure, did not appear to have exploded as the initiating incident.

The safety investigators privately conceded they had no known way of explaining through mechanical failure what had occurred. Even the mantra of their methodology -- the history of aviation accidents is a history of things that never happened before -- was recited without enthusiasm.

The belief that a bomb destroyed the airplane was always strongest. But even it suffered under the waves of negation: The cockpit, briefly thought to be the location of the explosion, was found mangled, but with parts of it, such as glass instrument dials, tellingly intact. It was thus ruled out as the site of the blast.

It was roughly then that high F.B.I. officials became aware of the positive findings. It is unclear how widely they shared the information within the investigators but as recently as this week, Mr. Francis of the Safety Board said he had no knowledge of any positive lab results. Meanwhile, investigators continued to release or confirm other pieces of information -- for example, ruling out the front cargo bins, the location of choice for numerous previous bombers, as the source of the blast.

Mr. Kallstrom, the central processor of all theories (including the absurd E-mail tips of extra-terrestrials), had a particular fascination with the idea that a missile had struck the aircraft.

''I gave up being surprised at anything a long time ago,'' Mr. Kallstrom said early on.

To some experts in terrorism and airline security, the notion that a missile had blown the aircraft out of the sky was far-fetched, and several expressed amazement at the ''shelf life of the missile theory.'' The plane was out of range, they said.

But others, Mr. Kallstrom included, had a resilient fealty to the rocket theory. He and others could not ignore the dozens of eyewitness accounts testifying to a streaking light intersecting with the aircraft. The details matched in many ways.

In addition, the notion that Stinger missiles from Afghanistan might have made their way into the United States was a longstanding assumption within law enforcement circles. The presence on the crash scene of officials with the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency reinforced in some minds that there might have been some intercepted intelligence regarding a missile attack.

And so the viability of the missile theory -- which seemed to carry a dread greater than a bomb -- rose and sank daily, in the minds of Mr. Kallstrom and other investigators. Yet, Mr. Kallstrom, early on, refused to acknowledge publicly how seriously investigators had taken the possibility of a missile attack. ''I don't want to scare people,'' he said in front of his agents.

Investigators ran down reports of stolen boats on Long Island, and senior investigators three days into the investigation broke down the likelihood of the three causes this way: 45 percent missile, 45 percent bomb, 10 percent malfunction.

Mr. Kallstrom ordered his agents to research the Mistral, a French-made missile that could be launched from a tripod and that would have had the range capability. Other experts offered the possibility that a small-engine Cessna might have been equipped to fire a Sidewinder missile.

The missile theory did not go away. Agents spent chunks of their days rereading the eyewitness interviews. A kind of missile cult emerged within the ranks of the agents. The group was never more enthusiastic than when one of the first preliminary positive results registered at the hangar in Calverton showed evidence of PETN, a component found in some missiles.

Meanwhile, the Department of Defense, asked to provide investigators with a full accounting of military activity that might have been going on in the area of the crash, launched such a diligent inquiry that it took days to come up with complete information, according to Mr. Kallstrom and Pentagon officials. Public records showed that the Navy had issued a warning to mariners that it might be conducting ''firing tests'' in a section of the sea roughly 80 nautical miles northeast of the crash scene. The Navy also had an aircraft near the crash site. It remained in the area briefly to provide help.

By late July, Mr. Kallstrom had doubts about the missile theory, but he never completely let go. And despite the Pentagon's assurances, he refused to rule out a ''friendly fire'' mishap, saying only that ''it's not in the crosshairs of my radar.''

Then, two weeks ago, came the most dramatic moment, which took place in a cramped third-floor laboratory in the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington. The endless frustration was snapped. The string of inconclusive results had ended: A positive finding for the explosives was confirmed with the highly sophisticated detection machinery.

The revelation of the finding -- which investigators insist does not rule out a missile -- sharpened the details of the remaining hunt: find the blast site, and with it the metal wreckage that could be brought before the cameras. Study the ''sick jewel'' for its signatures that could produce suspects: what contained the bomb, the exact type of explosive used, any fragment of the detonating device. Microscopic clues had produced breakthroughs for investigators in the Pan Am 103 bombing, a tiny sliver of a Toshiba stereo sending agents to North Africa.

''It doesn't get us all the way where we need to be,'' a senior investigator said of the lab finding.

But if the mystery had not been completely solved, Mr. Francis and others believed something strongly: A wonder had been worked. Yes, it might take a full dredging of the ocean floor before the right hunk of plane was recovered. Yes, things could have gone more smoothly. Yes, the safety board investigators would spend the coming months examining everything and one day recommending a range of thoughts on industry policies on aircraft construction, perhaps even on how the safety board and the F.B.I. might conduct a similar, subsequent investigation.

''What an incredible feat is being accomplished,'' Mr. Francis said of the entire effort. ''People say Jacques Cousteau does this all the time, Jacques Cousteau makes it look easy. Well, he's working off Bimini where you can see 94 miles through the water, and he's picking up shellfish, not jagged pieces of aluminum.''

A version of this special report appears in print on August 23, 1996, on Page A00001 of the National edition with the headline: Behind a Calm Facade, Chaos, Distrust, Valor. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe